


Hearts a mess

by sparrovvs



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mild Gore, Not Canon Compliant, Past Child Abuse, Pesterlog(s) (Homestuck), Post-Sburb (Homestuck), Sibling Incest, Slurs, everything works whatever way i want to make this work, fight me about it, just usual homestuck slurs so the r slur
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23258587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparrovvs/pseuds/sparrovvs
Summary: It makes no sense, but I’m desperate to connect. And you? You can’t live like this._________________________________________________________________________________working title, might change. based off of a veeeeeery old rp prompt i had for cherubplay. un-beta'ed!
Relationships: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Davesprite, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider/Davesprite
Kudos: 12





	Hearts a mess

Things are different. You know this already.

You knew it when you found the building, all cracked brick and steel bars skewered through crumbling concrete. It was the same as you had left it but all too different. The stairs up to the penthouse, so many floors above ground, would have creaked and complained with each step you took - had you taken any. Times when you used to have the floorboards memorized by their weak spots had flashed before your eyes like a shitty 30’s movie projector wheel. Back to times when survival hindered on whether or not you were clever enough to know the right step sequence to be absolutely silent on the way to and from the fridge, school, your room. Such a long time ago...

The door had been locked. The scratches around the deadbolt still stood in stark silence; the only reminder of late nights waiting for him to come home from work at the club. Knowing he would reek of alcohol as if he had been soaked in it on the turntables. Too drunk off his ass to fit A into B, key into slot. 

Last time you had stood there you had been a slight 5’5, hardly over 90 pounds. There had been nothing on your bones and when you had held the hilt of one of his shitty swords, grasping it on the way towards the familiar crunch of gravel that covered the roof, you had stood no chance. At that moment, your shoulder easily shook the door within it’s frame where you hit it squarely right beside the deadbolt. Once more and it gave into the strain and opened hard enough to bounce back off of the wall it hit. 

That had been months ago. 

Dave - the alpha timeline Dave, ascended and rightful in his title of Knight of Time - had brushed off the idea of returning to the relic that was the apartment. It was a long lost memory, so he liked to pretend. There was no need to screw with the past now. Him and Dirk had found somewhere new to call their own, an agreement that Davis understood but didn’t dare to input himself into. Your avoidance of talking about your place in the grand scheme of things left you mostly on your own to find a place to hold up. 

As much as you were glad at first the game gave you the mercy of not completely deleting game constructs such as yourself, it makes things complicated. Almost awkward, if you’re honest. 

The dynamics of your friend group, and the not-so-newly added individuals to create the Frankenstiened version you found yourself to be a part of now, was complicated. To say the least. You often find yourself staying on the sidelines while the rest of them settle into their respective roles and positions. 

It’s lucky that the one place you knew your place in was still standing. 

You’ve been staying there for the time being. At the apartment. It was left exactly how you’d seen it before all the shit left the fan, but within a few weeks you’d changed that. It is now a pretty good amalgamation of you-ness and the remains of what used to be your older brother’s belongings and interests. The once barren kitchen has become a hovel of trail mixes and assorted snack foods ripe for you to get your hands on whenever you please. The array of unsettling posters that used to cover the walls of the living room have one by one come down, left to collect dust trapped between the TV and speakers. Most of the anime figures have maintained their place, but the plethora of puppets and smuppets have been safely stowed away into the conveniently remaining chests. Weapons remain haphazardly strewn about the place. However, you no longer find yourself in any need of them in any practical way. 

Nope.

You’re living in the lap of a very strife-free luxury. 

For a while, it feels pretty damn good. 

The afternoon light still hits your room in just the way you like it once the clock strikes after 3PM. The golden rays illuminate the room, and subsequently the minuscule feathers that cover the length of your tail as it sways in lackadaisical ways over the side of your nest. You’ve grown comfortable enough in your own skin to call it that to yourself now. Beds never quite fit you right, so why the hell not give into the instinct? No one else sees it. 

Your mattresses. Dave’s mattresses. The mattresses in the room stacked one top of the other have been moved and reorganized so you could hollow out the middle and find the sweet, soft fluffy innards and mold them to your own creation. The old blankets and clothes around the apartment that had been musty with disuse at first quickly acquired new life under the watchful and picky gaze of crow insight, each artifact carefully tucked this way or that to facilitate maximum comfort. 

Most of your days are now spent there or in the living room, playing video games. By yourself or with John or Jade whenever they stop by. Sometimes Dirk and/or Dave will drop in for some nice relaxation seshes, though Dave never stays long. You see him most at their new place. For reasons you understand. 

Walking (or floating) the halls still feels wrong sometimes. Free range of the space isn’t what you’re wired for, and you know he feels the same whenever you catch him glance over his shoulder or cast a sideways look towards the now unoccupied desk in the living room or the newly stocked kitchen. A few times you’ve seen him dart his eyes up to the roof. If you were less of a pussy, you might get up the nerve to talk to him about it. 

You know Bro is never coming back, though. So sometimes the point seems mute. Even if you know Dave and Dirk make a point to talk about it with each other, you’ve never seen any reason in it. 

Why talk about someone long dead and gone? He was left back on LOWAS, gaping open for the consorts and fireflies to behold like some sick martyr. The thought hardly passes your mind anymore. Instead, you’re full of wonderings about SBAHJ plotlines, possibly sub-plotlines, and disconnected thoughts concerning your newest text conversations and group plans. 

There’s no reason for you to be expecting the slam of the front door that rings through the entirety of the small amount of the square feet the apartment holds. If hell’s bells had a sound, you would expect it to be that one. Every hair follicle and feather on your skin comes to life, raising at once in tandem. Your heart rate is always just slightly elevated by your unique anatomy, but you know even with that considered, it should never be going the one thousand miles a minute it is at that moment. 

There’s no footsteps. You have no way of telling who or what it is, other than the fact that you already know exactly who and what it is. It takes only a few seconds for cold sweat to gather and bead down your back between the spot where wing meets shoulder blades, causing you to shiver. Every muscle in your body has gone rigid, and yet the need to know draws you up from the edge of your nest where you’ve been laid out on your phone. The device is completely forgotten within the mess of fabric, left behind as you silently creep out of the structure towards the door.

The light that so generously drowns your room in sunny yellow isn’t as kind as to reach the hall. Only a small sliver of it tilts against the floor from your bedroom door, while the rest of the length of hardwood is dim with shadow. Even with the few feet you have between you and the door, you can see the figure that traverses the layout. He moves without flaw or hunch, perfect balance, as he maps out the way to the bathroom for the millionth time. His height towers in the narrow space with shoulders wide enough to seemingly fill it complete. You suddenly feel small. It’s as if nothing has changed, and the idea makes your entire body feel as if it’s in the wrong skin. 

The telltale squeak of the bathroom’s door hinges plays through the open space. He leaves the door wide open. Nice to know you haven’t been figured out yet. Not as nice to get an eyeful of him in some better light, albeit fluorescent and harsh. 

He looks the way you left him, only worse. There’s stains on the white fabric that sits snug over his broad shoulders; the usually (awfully) styled blonde facial hair is unruly and dark across his jaw and chin; and his hair is stood to so many points with mud, blood, and things you can’t even begin to identify. You won’t even mention his clothes. You won’t mention the dark, crusted over stain on the front of his shirt. The way it’s hardened and dried to the point of crisping the torn edge of the fabric. 

In the reflection you can see that there’s no darkened plastic on his face. There’s nothing to hide the grimace that rolls over his features. Fuck. So he does have facial expressions. You aren’t sure if it’s your shades, your fucked up eyes, or the general sepia toned aura surrounding the apartment in the late afternoon, but you swear his eyes are too gold. The same way yours are too orange, or Dave’s are too red. Unnatural. There isn’t much time to get a better look before gloved hands take hold of the bottom hem of his shirt and slowly pull up, up, up, until the offending piece of clothing is on the floor.

Oh.

Oh god. 

You choke back the sound that threatens to gag out of your throat. 

A trail of fine blonde hair directs perfectly up along your brother’s way too muscular torso, pointing precisely to the nastiest, gnarliest gash you’ve ever seen on another human being. It’s too wide. Too open. Too full of- you have no idea. Blood and you suppose infection. You didn’t think that it actually worked like that. Your own wound was closed over, a rubbery scar of a past opening. His is… fucked. His back leaves your line of sight, followed by his reflection in the mirror a second later, and you take it as your hint to stop.

Stop looking.

Stop thinking about it.

The hiss of the shower starting pulls you out of your horror-induced trance, thankfully. It’s nearly comical how quickly you scramble from the doorway back to the now definitely-not-a-nest. You know you’re shaking down to the smallest little down feathers on your tail, but it doesn’t stop you from grabbing up your phone again.

DS: okay i know i do this a lot  
DS: a ridiculous amount really  
DS: but this time i absolutely mean it when i say i have a monumental assfuck sized emergency  
DS: im talking 9/11 level catastrophe  
DS: the nation wont be the same airport security will become a nightmare and our trust in our government will waver drastically as time goes on  
DS: bush will be blamed for decades  
DS: im serious  
DS: rose i dont know what to do  
TT: I expected a lot more escalation on that comparison.  
TT: What’s so pressing that you don’t have the time to delve into the real intricacies of the greatest scam the American government has ever successfully thrown at it’s formerly unsuspecting citizens?  
DS: bro is back  
TT: Your brother is in the apartment?  
TT: As we speak?  
DS: yeah

Rose’s disconcertingly long and winded messages always take a retarded amount of time to land in your lap, but the pause after you confirm her questions is too long. Even for her. The droning sound of the water in the bathroom is the perfect backdrop to your oncoming freakout the longer you sit there with the phone clutched in your mutant hands. 

TT: The inevitable was always bound to make an appearance.  
TT: Fashionably late is better than insultingly early when considering proper arrival time etiquette.  
TT: I’m assuming you two haven’t spoken yet.  
DS: fuck no  
DS: hes in the shower  
DS: maybe ill get lucky maybe hell be the same freak of nature as before  
DS: spend a whole day and a half in there so i can come up with a functional escape plan  
DS: help me out here whats the best way to fling myself off the fire escape with a five pound bag of almonds in tow  
TT: Your avoidance behaviors are rearing their heads so unsubtly these days.  
DS: dont  
DS: im not going into this shit again  
DS: not now  
TT: Understood. I’ll leave the intervention attempts for later, after you’ve littered the Texan pavement with it’s new rain cycle of  
TT: Almonds.  
DS: listen if you help me out of this shit  
DS: we can talk about my daddy issues until were both blue in the face and ready to sport some black turtlenecks  
DS: i always wanted to try performance art  
TT: If one of us does come over to save you from your untimely demise via conflict confrontation it will probably cause a few issues.  
DS: like what  
TT: When has your brother ever been open to outside interference?  
DS: shit  
TT: Internal affairs aren’t pretty.  
TT: I could mediate but it would have to be a mutual desire. I don’t want to stage a CPS reenactment with myself as the agent.  
DS: you want me to ask him to sit down  
DS: have coffee  
DS: talk about the fact that hes been dead for years  
TT: Among other things.  
DS: haha right  
DS: isnt egbert the comedian  
DS: are you guys teaming up  
DS: id pay double for those tickets  
TT: I see you don’t like the idea.  
DS: no rose i dont  
DS: i need a real plan with limited face to face with him  
TT: I really don’t see any solutions aside from fleeing the scene as quickly as possible.  
TT: A band-aid solution, I’ll have you know.  
TT: There will only be so much time you can spend avoiding the apartment before you’ll have to go back. It’s your only place of residence.  
TT: If you’ve forgotten, all of your possessions currently reside there.  
TT: Couch surfing is a secondary, and very serious, form of homelessness.  
TT: If you are stuck in the way of fight or flight, I suppose I could come to your rescue.  
TT: ETA half an hour.  
TT: Would that suffice with your brother’s obscure hygiene habits?  
TT: Dave?

Every muscle in your body feels sore with tension. You’ve gotten halfway to the living room without a hitch, thanks to the lack of limbs to create the stupid infastructural groans that would have your ass caught in seconds flat. Your phone is on silent, so even if you can see the onslaught of purple messages on the screen in your peripherals, Bro can’t hear them. A few more feet and you’ll be free to move faster. As fast as your lithe little cheeto puff of a body will take you until you’re out the door never to return. 

With the ever present cosmical misfortune and tribulation that haunts your life, it shouldn’t be a shocker when the wall to your right shakes with the prognostic rattle of the shower pipes. The water stops seconds later, and you all but suspend in the air. As does your heart in your chest, since it suddenly no longer knows how to beat. Or maybe it knows how to beat too much. You can’t decide. Panic takes over and fucks over your entire system, all the wires crossing making it impossible to decide which way to go before footsteps fall behind you. 

“Oh. Shit.” Bro’s voice is deep and near rusty with disuse, but you’d know it anywhere. The accent hits you like a ton of bricks. No one else on the new Earth has it. Not in the same way. Dirk comes close, but nowhere near as authentic. For some reason, it makes your chest ache - or maybe that’s a symptom of the whole ‘frenzy of dread’ thing. 

There’s not much more of an option. You can complain all you like about not wanting a face to face confrontation, yet what else are you going to do? Make a break for it down the hall from a guy who can flash step to the door quicker than you could reach the halfway point? You’d get twice the beating: once for existing, once for being a coward and running. 

He still somehow towers over you in height. You have to look up as you turn to properly take him all in. There’s a towel over his hair, which he looks to have been leisurely drying from the arm that’s still held up, hand buried in said towel. He’s in his jeans but they’re unbuttoned and hanging off of his hips just below where the pelvis bones jut out a tad too far. If you didn’t know better, you would say he froze just like you did. That would imply he wasn’t expecting it. Didn’t hear you. That’s not how it works, and the idea is pushed from your brain as quickly as it was dropped there. 

“Hey.” You don’t even manage to get the one word out without your voice splitting into two separate notes of the same sound. Damn your syrinx. Damn your trachea. Damn the entire physiology. You can feel your face light up with an unwarranted, frustrated blush at the embarrassing slip. 

You don’t want to look at Bro, but there’s nowhere else to look. His expression is somehow just as unreadable without the shades as it is with them. That has to be some kind of taught skill. There’s no hint as to what he’s thinking as he speaks flatly. “Bird boy.” 

“Uh. Yeah.” You try not to think about the fact that he didn’t call you Dave.

You hate when people call you Dave.

“Didn’t see anything on the roof. Thought no one was here.” He explains as if he thinks he actually has to explain himself. 

You know what he’s referring to; back then, there would always be something on the roof. Whether that be a six pack of beer on ice, a rogue notepad filled with ever shitty comics and doodles you were working on at the time, or a blanket or two for when evenings got colder. (For when he didn’t have time to waste to get bandages and needed to rip fabric up to tie around your bleeding limbs.)

“I don’t really… go up there a lot.” 

Seeing the way that one of his eyebrows just barely twitches upwards for a second makes you want to curl your shoulders up and hide away inside yourself. Your one good wing raises at the idea of doing so, as if it were ready to start up the process already. 

“Right.” Bro’s tone is as conclusive as it is apathetic. 

He starts to move and your body jolts. It feels like it must be noticeable, as if you jumped ten feet in the air, but he doesn’t react at all. There’s no fault in his saunter while he makes his way down the hall, right past you. The scent of overly saturated mango and some undefined fruit cocktail sweeps by with him and cloys up your nose for half a second. You don’t remember seeing his shampoo in there the last time you bathed, but you also can’t hardly remember your own name right now. So you let the slip up slide. 

It’s another half a minute before you hear the futon springs cave under weight - Bro’s weight - and take it as a signal to move. You can feel how mechanical you are and you’re almost glad. It feels like something else is pulling you along, and you’re thankful that it’s there to do the work so you don’t end up hanging in the hall like all of his old marionettes used to. Stuck there waiting for him to do something about it. The thought alone makes you surge forward just a notch quicker. 

Only once you’re in your room with the door firmly shut and your wings pressed back against it uncomfortably tight do you let yourself breathe. It’s a shaking, forced thing, but it alleviates some of the pain that’s been constricting your ribs this entire time. You don’t recall when your eyes suddenly got so wet, or why, or how long the ruff around your neck has been quivering like a Chuzzle Deluxe clicked by the cursor one too many times. After all, nothing happened. There was no confrontation. Not really. That would hardly even count as a talk by most standards.

Yet your cheeks don’t cool down from their heated state, and your vision starts to swim. 

In an idiot move, you bring a hand up to rub across your face, and end up smashing your shades into the bridge of your nose. Not to mention how the rough keratin covered back of your hand rubs against your skin in the least pleasant way. The most pathetic mix of a laugh and sigh, maybe part sob, leaves you in a moment of instant regret. 

Your phone falls from your other, now unoccupied hand with a theatrical clack against hardwood. You wouldn’t be able to properly read whatever Rose has to say now anyways. Distantly, you can hear the sound of the television turning on and the original Xbox starting up.


End file.
